It's difficult to measure the impact of many services, making it a tough sell to the business.
While SOA has real promise, business managers may turn a jaded ear to the latest wonder acronym. After all, many new technologies require years of heavy spending on complex projects that fail as often as not. And SOA faces additional hurdles: Its promise of faster development and reusable code is nothing new, and the concept can be hard to explain. "SOA is a very broad hand-waving term," says John Devadoss, director of architecture strategy at Microsoft.

"SOA is a tough sell on the business side," seconds Matthew Quinn, chief technology officer at SOA vendor Tibco Software Inc. He says smart CIOs should instead emphasize how they can change business processes.

But that's easier said than done, adds Railinc's Grandlienard. He says it's difficult to measure the impact of many services, and metrics tend to focus on things like faster turnaround times or less need for quality-assurance testing, metrics not always obvious to business units.

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, believes that IT needs to make it clear that SOA allows the business to increase its control over software. "The business process becomes the application in a way that it wasn't able to before," says Schmelzer.

But SOA is not a panacea. It can create headaches, such as the need to store, catalog and manage hundreds or thousands of services so they can be reused. It will help business applications that change frequently, such as those in financial services companies, but may not be worth the effort for other kinds of applications, Schmelzer says, such as those that don't handle many transactions.

And many of the benefits of SOA mean little to business departments, says Randy Heffner, an analyst at Forrester Research. He says that much of SOA currently involves what he calls "service with a lower-case S," mostly good for application integration and other IT uses, rather than more strategic applications of SOA, such as that being done at ADP.

Indeed, developing an SOA strategy requires the IT department to have a deep understanding of how the business works. Yet, combining business knowledge with tech savvy is an uncommon skill—the most significant reason why companies tend to get better at using SOA over time.

SOA's benefits go beyond easing IT's burden.

Think about services as a strategic tool in your business.

Next page: The Future

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